Wednesday, February 15, 2017

It’s always difficult to measure mental health and emotional
well-being. Sending out teams of grad students to ask pre-formulated questions to random victims distorts the picture.

You don’t really want to rely on self-reports of someone’s happiness
quotient. Do you? In a culture that tells you that you must flourish, you would
not dare tell an anonymous interviewer that you are not flourishing. You might
not understand what it means to flourish but you know the right answer to the
question.

More salient and more to the point, for those of us who wish
to measure mental health, is how well people can function on the job. After
all, the nation is awash in therapy. Anyone who is not in therapy is almost surely
taking one or another psychoactive drug. American millennials are being
outcompeted by just about all their peers around the world, but they and their
older cohorts should be leading the world in flourishing.

To everyone’s shock and awe, such is not the case.
Apparently, American workers are so emotionally overwrought by the recent
election that they cannot focus on their jobs. They cannot concentrate. They
cannot focus. They cannot function in the workplace. As soon as someone brings up politics their emotions begin to boil and they gird their loins, ready for arguments, fights and drama.

This tells us that therapy, such as it is, produces less
mental health than ideological conformity. It’s not about your well-being. It’s
about indoctrinating you in politically correct opinions.

It offers you membership in a cult of like-minded and
like-feeling individuals. Any encounter with someone who thinks differently threatens your identity as a member of the cult. You joined the cult because you believed that all right-thinking people thought as you did. Discovering that you are not even in the majority makes you crazy. Rather than change your mind
or balance your opinions, you go berserk. There, that will show them!

The Atlantic reports that the American psyche is
disintegrating. It sees the evidence in the workplace. During the campaign things were not looking very promising, from a mental health perspective:

Months
before the election, there were reports of greater
political tension in offices than in previous election cycles. In one survey from
the American Psychological Association, 10 percent of respondents said that
political discussions at work led to stress, feeling cynical, difficulty
finishing work, lower work quality, and diminished productivity.

Now that the election is over, things are getting worse:

Now, a
new survey commissioned by BetterWorks—a software company that helps workers
with setting and tracking goals—finds that post-election, politics is
continuing to take a toll on workplace productivity. The online survey included
500 nationally representative, full-time American workers, and found that 87
percent of them read political social-media posts during the day, and nearly 50
percent reported seeing a political conversation turning into an argument in
the workplace. Twenty-nine percent of respondents say they’ve been less
productive since the election.

29% is not a trivial number. It is not a rounding error.

As it happened, things were not very good even before the
political season dawned. McKinsey had already discovered that workplace
incivility and general rudeness were on the rise. The reason, in our
technologically advanced world people do not interact with other people… on a
personal level. People telecommute. People text and email. It’s all abstract
and dehumanizing. No one has a face.

You recall the reaction to Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban
telecommuting at Yahoo! People rose up to denounce her for being a sexist misogynist
and many other awful things. One cannot say that Mayer’s tenure has been a
great success… for Yahoo! at least… but one must credit her for a good
decision.

When she took over the company, the offices were a
wasteland, empty and unused. Even if she could not turn the company around, she
did make a good decision when she banned telecommuting. Now, if only companies
could ban texting between people who are sitting next to each other.

The Atlantic explains the McKinsey study:

According
to a study from McKinsey, workplace incivility was already
on the rise. Researchers suspect the increasing rudeness at the office
could result from a variety of factors: from the rise of remote work, to
tension over changing workplace hierarchies, or the lack of face-to-face
interaction in the age of email and Slack. For businesses, there are costs
associated with less collegial workplaces including increased stress, employee
turnover, and eroding the trust
required for collaborative work. Duggan says that managers should help
their employees focus on work, and that while support groups or other
interventions sound good, it might be a further distraction. “The problem with
that is you do a debrief about the election, then you have to do a debrief at
the inauguration, then you have to do a debrief about the first week, the
second week, and it doesn't stop.”

Funnily enough, offices have already discovered that they
gain no advantage by having debriefing sessions—which resemble group therapy—about
political matters. Why should that be so? Simply put, people see debriefing
sessions as occasions to vent, to express their feelings, to let fly, not to
hold back. Where do you think they got the idea that meetings were the
place to do some group therapy, not to address a problem or to brainstorm a
solution?

Today’s modern management consultants have contributed to
this problem. They have produced a doctrine that is called “bringing your ‘whole
self’ to work.” Think about it: companies pay consultants large sums to offer
up recycled and repackaged psychobabble. I defy anyone to tell me what a “whole
self” is? You can make like philosopher David Hume and rummage around in your
mind searching for your whole self. If you do you will like Hume discover that
there is no such thing. And besides, what does it mean to bring half a self to
the office.

The
idea of not bringing politics to work is not just old school, it also clashes
with another increasingly popular doctrine of modern work—the idea of bringing
your “whole self” to the workplace. Even HR professionals admit that
making the office a politics-free
zone would be pretty hard at this point.

Didn’t the management gurus figure out that you come to work
in order to… work. There, that wasn’t very hard. And that many aspects of your
whole self that you do well to leave out of the workplace. Your political
opinions are high on the list. Your emotional problems with your spouse or your
significant other are also on the list. Your feelings about your dog or about
the neighborhood beggars should also be kept out of the workplace. And you do
well to keep your lubricious longings to yourself when you are on the job.

The business of business is business. Your job is not an
extension of your experience with therapy. You are not looking to flourish and
you are not looking for deep meanings. You are there to do a job. Not because it's your heart's desire but because you have contracted to do so-- and you want to be good to your word.

True enough, you cannot completely banish politics from the
office. After all, politics impacts business. And yet, which genius imagined
that the options ranged between making the office a “politics-free zone” and
discussing politics with everyone all the time.

Perhaps the problem is not so much the politics, which is,
after all a function of the real world, but the emotion that people attach to
it. And perhaps the problem is that there is not enough accurate information,
not enough facts… but too much feeling,
too much distortion and a news media that believes its job to be to cherry-pick
the facts that are most likely to fire up everyone’s passions… regardless of
the consequences.

It’s not so much the politics. It’s that people do not know
what to do with the information. Their minds have been deformed by the school
system and the media… so all they know how to do is to emote. They do not
process information; they look for hidden meanings and conspiracies. They do
not want to see how the game is being played. They do not care to examine all
sides of the question.

They do what they were taught to do. They look for the
narrative thread and the conspiracy that is afoot. Worse yet, they do not want
to know what is going on. They want to know how they feel.

If it’s all politics and if you should devote all your time
and energy to the war against Trump, one thing is certain, your workplace
performance will suffer.

Now, tell me why is the stock market so optimistic about the
future of American business?

5 comments:

Politics in the workplace is not the problem. My career spanned 35 years and there was never a problem with politics (excepting organizational politics, of course), and I worked with people from all political persuasions, right to left.

The problem in the workplace is Proglodyte SJWs whose default political mode is point-and-shreik. And that's not just a workplace problem. SJWs create toxic political problems wherever they are.

What if the unbalanced are evaluating balance, and calling for balance?

What if the insane are evaluating insanity, and calling for sanity?

People get upset about lots of things. You may get rear-ended on your way to work, your kid is in detention, your marriage is in shambles, your uncle just got arrested, and your grandmother is dying. That's life. And you can't help but bring your life to work. You're a human being. Everyone is there to share in your experience.

Right?

Wrong!

Yes, you are a human being. But work is for work. Work is work. Work is not therapy. The workplace may be a community, but it's not a recruiting ground. It's not a team locker room looking for some rah-rah cause. People are there to work.

The REAL problem is that Leftists don't draw a distinction between politics and anything. Work or anything else!

You bringing your political hobby to work and foisting it on everyone else is the equivalent of bringing your model rocket, collector coins or reality TV hobby/fetish to work... and imposing it on others by repetition, noise or just plain whining that no one is paying attention to you. All this claiming to be promoting democracy and free speech, while shutting down discussion. It's insane.

We have lunatic Democrats babbling about Russians living under our beds, in our voting machines, and in our phones. When Democrat representatives promulgate these looney thoughts to their base from official government podiums, in front of news media, it greenlights those same political activists to bring it into their lives and those they live with. That includes the workplace. At a fevered pitch.

"I defy anyone to tell me what a “whole self” is? You can make like philosopher David Hume and rummage around in your mind searching for your whole self. If you do you will like Hume discover that there is no such thing."

Really? Well, someone then better tell my first grade teacher, who told me to put it all in, put it all out, then shake it all about.

Stuart: It’s not so much the politics. It’s that people do not know what to do with the information. Their minds have been deformed by the school system and the media… so all they know how to do is to emote. They do not process information; they look for hidden meanings and conspiracies. They do not want to see how the game is being played. They do not care to examine all sides of the question.

This seems like a garbled analysis. Or perhaps this is an example of how men see women? Surely its women's problem that they emote, that they (mis)-teach in schools while men do real work? But now these uppity women have filled offices, rather than caring for children at home, so they're messing up all the men at work.

I did hear an interesting dialogue yesterday, between Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, and (libertarian thinker?) Stefan Molyneux. Peterson's recent claim to fame was trashing the transexuals and 32 flavors of gender.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcEJr8h_yGM The Architecture of Belief | Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux

The two seemed to have quite a lot of agreement, and Molyneux largely let Peterson lead the conversation, with just chiming in on agreement along the way.

One of Peterson's claims was that having more women in positions of power means society is getting warped by an unwise "material instinct" now being inflicted on society as women are having fewer children, and redirect this instinct to all of humanity, which leads to, among other things, refugee programs bent on compassion, without good sense to see how these traumatized and foreign cultured people can fit in and thrive (or flourish).

Anyway, it would make sense that someone like Trump scares women silly, because he offers no deference at all. So it would seem like the world is under threat.

OTOH, I admit I did have one conversation at work from a woman who was a Trump Supporter, using the standard lines that Trump wasn't her first choice, and she hated Hillary, and that we need to give Trump a chance, and it seems clear that she's not interested in objective facts or her own good sense to reject a scoundrel.

But perhaps my efforts to "examine all sides of the question" is flawed as well, and I'm using "confirmation bias" as much as anyone. I see Trump as a menace, and pay attention to what he's doing wrong. Still I feel convinced if the Democrats were somehow suckered into electing a clown like Trump "Only I can fix it" I would be equally against him, and hope he's impeached as quickly as possible.

I'm just not sure if objective analysis is possible with Trump, except for the fact we have to wait until there is sufficient objective harm to support his objective impeachment hearing.

No one with a brain should see Trump as anything but a conman. Being rich isn't a sign of wisdom and good judgment, but a sign of someone who was born on third base, and who had lots of chances to fail, and succeeded despite himself, discovering that many people are not interested in truth, but the best lies money can buy.

Trump's only virtue that I can see is that he believes in himself, and that confidence means he's willing to break things just to see how they work, and now we can let him try to break as many things as we can bear, just to see what happens.

And perhaps we'll come close to nuclear war again, and when we narrowly avoid it, we'll decide giving one man the power to kill millions on his bad day is a bad idea. And maybe we'll notice its hypocritical to complain mad men in other countries shouldn't have nukes we we show such poor judgment in our leader.

A dangerous game, but we've been playing this game since before I was born, and maybe we can end the (MAD) game before I die?

And I being melodramatic, just emoting? I'll believe that as soon as I imagine a scenario that I'd launch nuclear weapons if I was president.